And where did the stories went? Into blogs and social networks. A must read.

There are no stories in today’s top stories.

It’s all sound bites and lots of effect – punch lines, cutting here and there and everywhere, but rarely that crucial detail that will grab your attention for more than a few moments.

The most popular print news ends up being a Metro, or some similar thin collection of captions, titles, and photographs. The news business being in the business of getting the news published and circulated, killed the story – your stories.

This might be the top reason why print is dying. Editors deliver a product that is packaged as a self contained, portable medium readers can consume on the go. MacNews with cell phone conversations on the side. You will feel satisfied, but hardly nourished.

We are stitching together our own stories. With the help of new media, we add our own flavor to the news that matters to us. The additional dimensions come in many flavors – comments on blogs, feeds, online communities – more and more away the conversation happens from mainstream media sites.

Writing for the web implies using a different set of rules than for print. Both the conceptual and graphic organization of the information has to be done in a rather different way, using links for external complementary data, making space between ideas for easier reading, simplifying the stream of ideas while keeping all of it’s informational potential for the reader.

But other values rise when it comes to capturing the audience for news websites. SEO has a great influence to bring more or less visits to a given article. Using the right words we can increase the number of readings of a certain article, and then the news companies can claim to the advertisers an inflated audience, thanks to the use of popular Google keywords, but that aren’t even closely related to the article’s content.

Charlie Brooker explains this situation quite well and this issue becomes of most relevance if we think that the presence of certain images and words in the frontpages has always conditioned our attention and interest in the moment of buying a newspaper, but on the web the search mechanisms made the relevance and visibility of some texts something totally artificial. The use of social bookmarking to credibilize content helps to separate the good from the bad, but often the best contents don’t reach the majority of the users.

The ethical question raised here is should a journalist use highly valued SEO contents to compose the title and the first paragraph of an article? I believe it’s all a matter of common sense, since when we get fooled by a website we never go back there again.

So, to all of you who ended up here because of Cristiano Ronaldo Lost free sex videos in iPhone, my sincere apologies. Once again, do not treat your readers like idiots. The backlash will be immediate.

And wait, it gets worse. These phrases don’t just get lobbed in willy-nilly. No. A lot of care and attention goes into their placement. Apparently the average reader quickly scans each page in an “F-pattern”: reading along the top first, then glancing halfway along the line below, before skimming their eye downward along the left-hand side. If there’s nothing of interest within that golden “F” zone, he or she will quickly clear off elsewhere.

Which means your modern journalist is expected not only to shoehorn all manner of hot phraseology into their copy, but to try and position it all in precisely the right place. That’s an alarming quantity of unnecessary shit to hold in your head while trying to write a piece about the unions. Sorry, SEXUAL unions. Mainly, though, it’s just plain undignified: turning the journalist into the equivalent of a reality TV wannabe who turns up to the auditions in a gaudy fluorescent thong in a desperate bid to be noticed.

We can no longer live without a cellphone. It can be used for anything, even for phone calls. But what is we used them to assume our role as Citizan Journalists?

This is the starting point of the project headed by Guy Berger, that is promoting workshops for high school students in South Africa, to learn how to write news in 140 characters. Now it only takes to use the rest of the features to become truly mobile – and intrinsically, due to the technical characteristics of the device- multimedia citizen journalism.

And there’s a question apropos: can those messages be written in the current sms abbreviations to be later decoded at the newsrooms?

In August, we start some initial workshops with high school learners, to discuss with them what it takes to be “citizen journalists” – contributing content that the mainstream will publish.

What’s more, the content is constrained by being 140 characters long – sms is the method of comms for now. Over the course of 8 workshops, 80 learners in their penultimate school year will be trained about optimum Cit-journ in this way … all over two months.

They’re here, we are a part of them, they have the power, and we must know how to deal with it. Dan Schultz wrote another of his brilliant articles on how users can participate in the construction of the news agenda, and how that participation can be managed. Highly recommended.

We all know that the “audience” analogy no longer represents the way journalism should work. We know that the people reading the news have opinions, perspectives, and facts that are relevant to the conversation. Some of them just have observations, but others are reporters at heart or maybe they have the wordsmithing abilities of a columnist.

This post is about how the news system I’ve been blogging about can be driven by user generated content and collective intelligence. In a larger sense, however, it is about the way in which any news organization can make the move past the one-sided “audience” view of things and incorporate the voices and minds of its readers to better serve the public.

Paul Bradshawtalks about the importance and the changes in the role of distribution of news content through the internet. A small but very interesting video. Note the fact it was published with Seesmic.